How I Got 16 Links in 20 Minutes With&nbsp$9

This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Recently, when the Twitter world was buzzing a bit about @markdavidson's Twitter joke about being abused by his supposed ghostwriters, I started a small joke about how Mark may or may not be a real person. When discussing the events with my coworker Karen, I noticed that some details of Mark's background didn't check out properly. For example, we tried to call a couple of phone numbers associated with Mark's websites and personality, the numbers ran through to a generic voicemail without details. It seemed very strange for someone who worked at a marketing agency to not have their voicemail set up properly, and we grew suspicious.

Karen asked me the question, "Is this guy even real?" and I knew we had an idea for a great site at that point. Nine dollars later, I owned "IsMarkDavidsonReal.com", and then spent 20 minutes throwing together a fast one-page site, detailing the weird things we'd found and a form asking people to send us more leads. I tweeted a link to the site once, and had a couple of retweets to help spread the word. I was caught by surprise by how well it caught on right afterwards though - In the first hour after I launched the site, I received over 1000 hits, and the rate continued. A number of news/gossip blogs linked to the site as part of the ongoing discussion, and I got a call from a reporter from The Atlantic for an interview. The site wound up attracting a significant amount of attention in a very short time.

This is really interesting, because we can create a play-by-play of when the site was tweeted, when it was first linked to from another site, and when it started to record organic search traffic to the website. I hope this is helpful to people looking at getting new sites indexed and ranking - As the timeline shows, I went from my first visit, to my first inbound link, to my first organic search visit from Yahoo in just over an hour.

The Timeline of IsMarkDavidsonReal.com

This timeline was pulled from the logs of HubSpot's analytics engine.

September 22nd: Around 11:30 PM EDT, I register the domain "IsMarkDavidsonReal.com". I don't do anything with it right away. (All other times are in EDT as well)

September 23rd: The next morning around 7:30 AM I update the DNS to point to an actual page, which became the site's homepage. I haven't told anyone about this site yet, and hold talking about it until I've created the homepage so I don't spoil it for my coworkers.

2:00 PM: Now that the DNS is resolving worldwide, I create the site's homepage, put a form on it, and leave it for an hour.

3:23 PM: I tweet a link to the site, and it is retweeted almost right away by @karenrubin and @markdavidson. Mark also posts the link to his Facebook profile. (Not a fan page, his personal profile. Mark's privacy settings are such that his wall and profile are not visible without being Friends with him.)

3:23 PM: The site gets its first visits, from Twitter and then from the Facebook post.

3:42 PM: A link to the website is published in a Metafilter post, and gets a visit from the post within a few seconds of being published. This is the website's first inbound link and first visit that isn't from Twitter, a Twitter client (like Hootsuite) or Facebook. Also worth noting, the link from Metafilter is a dofollow link.

Over the next hour, the website continues to get a significant amount of traffic, almost entirely from Twitter but occasionally from Metafilter or Google Reader. By looking at the specific Google Reader referring URLs, it appears that they are people who read Metafilter via RSS and are subscribed in Reader. (All of the referring URLs reference metafilter after the google.com/reader section). At this point, the website is getting approximately 60-70 hits a minute, and I am only getting about one visit every 5-10 minutes from Facebook. It appears the Facebook post hit its half-life very quickly and did not spread like it did on Twitter.

4:40 PM: The website gets its first visit from Organic Search, from a Bing-powered Yahoo search at 4:40 PM for the query, "Is Mark Davidson Real?"

5:11 PM: The website gets its first visit from a share on Google+.

6:02 PM: The website gets its first visit from Google's search engine, from a search on google.nl for "ismarkdavidsonreal". This clearly looks like someone who was already familiar with the domain because they typed it with no spaces. However, their browser had not been seen before - There was no tracking cookie set from previous visits from that browser.

Very shortly afterwards, over the next ten minutes, a number of blogs pick up the URL and start sending traffic through, as well as a lot more search traffic - After those first visits, several more visits come through for different search terms around "mark davidson twitter" and "is mark davidson real" and similar phrases. The website is still getting very significant traffic at this point, and ends up getting almost 2500 visits before midnight.

Here is a chart of overall traffic over the weekend for the domain, for anyone who is curious how it trailed off:

It isn't clear exactly when Google indexed the site, but it clearly took less than three hours for a brand-new domain with absolutely no history to be indexed and appear in search results for very closely related keywords, even with one or two inbound links initially. Bing was clearly much faster at indexing my new site - I started receiving traffic much earlier from Bing-powered search, and this was a topic that was receiving a decent amount of search volume in that brief window. I was very pleasantly surprised that Bing managed to index and start sending me traffic barely an hour after the site appeared on the web, and apparently solely based on Twitter and Facebook activity.

Without access to the Twitter stream anymore, Google had to wait a relatively long time to find out about my website, index it, and move on - Google took over two hours from the Metafilter post to start sending me search traffic. If they were tracking more social media activity, they would have picked up on it much more quickly. Bing's jumped right on it. Still, anyone being able to find my website via search in that short a time period is pretty remarkable - Search is a fast and powerful medium to draw in traffic, and modern search engines are able to handle and add new sites very quickly.

While it's possible that the pages were indexed much earlier on and I just didn't get traffic until then, I think that is fairly unlikely - The topic was popular, and once I started getting search traffic at all from a source it started coming through in a pretty strong fashion. I have no evidence to back it up but it's the most likely explanation given that I started to receive continued volume after the first search - people were just waiting to have a good search result to click, and Google and Bing were waiting to finish adding my site.

Breaking this down after the event, I now have sixteen do-follow links pointing to the domain and a large number of nofollow from other websites. I'm exploring what exactly I can do with them to maximize the value out of them, but in terms of harnessing current events and turning them into SEO value, the website did a great job - For 20 minutes of work and $9 for a domain registration, I was able to harness a lot of traffic and buzz momentarily. It absolutely pays off to stay on top of what's going on across the web, because you never know when opportunity will strike and offer you a chance to do something fun and build SEO value out of it. I hope this provides you with some inspiration to the value of these small sites and how you can do interesting things with fast moving topics or hot issues.

Oh wow...now you have my head thinking up all sorts of ideas. Here's how I interpret the post:

1. Keep an eye out for an interesting fresh topic

2. Create a website geared towards that topic

3. Once the hullabaloo has died down then 301 the site to a page on my website that has similar (if not the same) content.

I can think of so many ways to do this. I think my head is going to explode. Thanks. How am I going to sleep tonight?

Question though:

If you did do the 301, would that be considered black (or perhaps grey) hat? On one hand the people who were linking to the site were linking to the great content and that content would still be at the other end of the link. On the other hand, there's some trickery involved.

I think that's best. I was going to mention it anyway, but as you guys were discussing it I thought I'd jump in.

Even for those visiting the site at a later date (however few they may be in number), to be 301'ed to something that might only be slightly relevant or not relevant at all is a little bit... dodgy. Just from a usability point of view - the visitor wanted to see something about Mark Davidson but was redirected elsewhere completely.

I reckon an anchor text link would be the way to go - even if a 301 could potentially pass more link juice, it's a safer bet (from an ethical stance).

I like this case study, which furthers the benefits of utilizing current events to bring you that short term boost in traffic. However, I am not sure what the benefits of this are in the long run. Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new page or blog about this on an existing domain so that traffic comes directly to the site where most of your SEO efforts are focused instead of a completely new domain?

Putting the same effort into a blog post or new page to your site, could result in the same links, social media referrals, and organic search rankings as a completely new domain. I think even if it didn't result in as much traffic or links, the value of that smaller amount of traffic and links would be worth more still.

I think, in this case, it probably wouldn't have achieved the same effect if he just wrote a blog post titled "Is Mark Davidson Real?" on his own site. I think a lot of people RT it and link to it because of the novelty of it being its own clever domain.

That's why I asked if he intended to eventually 301 it to his own site or canonical to his site.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I didn't think about the novelty of it having it's own domain being the reason for how quickly he received that amount of engagement. Then I wonder the same thing, whether redirecting it is the plan or if he has another strategy.

It's amazing how fast a site can be indexed and ranking these days - I had a similar (although smaller scale) experience recently. New domain, just for fun, was up and ranking in about 3-4 days, almost entirely from social media mentions.

I think the "sandbox," in the way people originally meant it, is behind us. I strongly suspect it's more of a grace period now. Google even seems to be giving new sites the benefit of a doubt, in many cases - letting them rank initially while they build up links and can be fully evaluated.

Agreed, ranking happens so quickly now. I set up a site at the beginning of September and within about 3 weeks posts were ranking in Google within 2 hours of being published (even though I was only posting 3-4 per week).

Could us non-US types have some background about who Mark Davidson is please? I'm a bit confused because you mention that he works for a marketing agency, but if reporters picked up on it then he must be someone of influence?

It is really a great experiment Brian Whalley your efforts are 100% appreciable your article keep surprising me from the start to end and the most surprising thing is that how bing respond a traffic much earlier to your site than Google does it is really unexpected.It seems that Bing should be taken seriously,I will definitely do some experiment with my blog to track how quick bing responds.

I already owned some hosting, and so adding a new domain to the hosting doesn't cost me anything - The only thing I had to pay for was the domain registration. For example, DreamHost offers unlimited domain hosting for pretty low rates, and I already had a plan.

It's incredible how in a pair of hours can be developed all a social media strategy. Now we have to extract conclusions for applying it to standard websites where interest by followers is not as clear as in this case. Congratulations and thanks for sharing it.

An interesting study on how being agile can have near-instant - if somewhat limited - value. Do this a few times for a few different topics, making sure each new site links back to yours and that you keep the site live to not appear black hat, and the results could be interesting.

I'm very new to all this, and it sounds like it's a really good idea, but for a novice, I'm not sure I wouldn't get myself into trouble. The original post date was back in October, and I'm sure Google's made a lot of changes since then; any new updates on the idea? As a side note, I'm with Jenni @ Heart Internet, who is Mark Davidson, or rather who is he supposed to be? I see she got a thumbs down for asking, but really...

This seems to be more a case study in having a good idea and taking advantage of it, but it's still a nice post.

Really, the speed at which your site was indexed and began sending traffic is impressive, and especially that the engine with direct lines into Twitter's data was able to do it before shows how highly social media is being valued by the engines now.

Interesting article. The hyperlink in the content below is broken. Just a typo in the href tag: September 22nd: Around 11:30 PM EDT, I register the domain "IsMarkDavidsonReal.com". I don't do anything with it right away. (All other times are in EDT as well)

That's great case study...You have done in an awesome way. you found the right trending topic which could create a lot of attention/buzz in people.. and Voila! You got it! thanks for the presentation of the scenario of your case study!

Really interesting - do you have a long-term plan for the microsite? Maybe eventually move the content to a page on your domain and 301 it? Or, as Rand has talked a lot about recently, put the same content on your domain and just rel= canonical the site to your domain?

I find it interesting how quickly the site was indexed, and I enjoy these types of "experiments." However, like many other commenters I am curious how I can use this strategy to benefit a primary site?